Arielle Greenberg’s I Live in the Country & other dirty poems exploits and undoes the stereotype of the “wholesome country life.” Here, the speaker moves to the country (“where the animals are”) in order to live a whole life, one in which she can live honestly and openly in a nonmonogamous marriage. Her book is a visceral, erotic celebration of the cornucopia of sexual pleasures to be had in that rural life—in the muck of a pasture in spring or behind the bins of whole-wheat pastry flour at the local co-op. Greenberg hauls out what has previously been stored under dark counters and labeled deviant—kink, fetish, and bondage—and moves it into the sunshine of sex-positivity and mutual consent. In doing so, she forges new literary territory—a feminist re-visioning of the Romantic pastoral poems of seduction. “I am trying to turn my eye toward joy,” she writes. “My heart toward bliss.”

Jennifer Franklin reimagines an Antigone for our times in her third collection, If Some God Shakes Your House, where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance. Franklin’s Antigone is ferocious, feeling, and unafraid of the consequences of speaking the truth to power about the political atrocities she has witnessed and personal traumas she has withstood. With a sensitivity that equally elevates the quotidian and the classical, and an attention that moves from the ancient ruins of Pompeii to the right of bodily autonomy and agency stripped away by our own Supreme Court, Franklin reveals the high stakes of our moment where “the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.” Franklin’s Antigone has embraced the sacrifice of self for something greater—a dual devotion to her disabled daughter and to her art. “For twenty years, I have been disappearing,” she writes in the book’s final poem, yet she continues to sing.

Ignatz takes the form of a cycle of love poems—in radical variations—based on Ignatz Mouse, the rodent anti-hero and love-object of George Herriman’s classic comic strip Krazy Kat. For decades, Krazy Kat rang the changes on a quirky theme of unrequited love: cat loves mouse; mouse hates cat; mouse hits cat with brick; cat mistakes brick for love; and so on, day after day. The backgrounds of the strip were in constant inexplicable flux: a desiccated specimen of Arizona flora morphs in the next panel into a crescent moon, then into a snowcapped butte, while the characters chatted obliviously on, caught up in their own obsessive round.

Moving through pacy, overflowing sentences, enigmatic aphoristic observations, and pointed imagistic vignettes, Youn’s second collection vividly captures the way the world reorients around an object of desire: the certainty that your lover “will appear in the west, backlit by orange isinglass,” the ability to intuit a lover’s presence from the way “unseen flutes / keep whistling the curving phrases of your body.” Youn skillfully draws on the repeating narrative motifs and haunting landscapes of Krazy Kat as she tests and surpasses the limits of lyric to explore the cyclical elements of romanticized love. Youn speaks to and with her poetic forbears, whether St. John Perse, whose phrase “robed in the loveliest robe of the year” (T.S. Eliot’s translation) recurs in several love songs to Ignatz, or Geoffrey Hill, whose Mercian Hymns these poems recall in their serial structure and their commingling of the contemporary and classical. Ignatz is a poignant foray into the inventive possibilities of obsession and passion.

Willard’s love of music combines with his love and respect for the natural world. Often rooted in, or coming out of, domestic encounters, the poems of this collection rise up (much like the clouds over his oft-traversed Rockies), as the speaker throws his attention to earth and sky, better to understand his own dynamic and shifting inner weather.

For award-winning poet James Fujinami Moore, the past is never past. In this brutal debut, sensual, political, and imagined worlds collide, tracing a history of diaspora and trauma that asks: what do we do in the aftermath of violence, and why do we long to inflict it? From Vegas boxing rings and the restless sands of Manzanar to the scrolling horrors of a Facebook feed, Moore’s poems trace over intimate details with surprising humor, fierce eroticism, and a restless eye.

Cyrus Cassells has perfected a poetics of merciful vitality and tenderness, celebrating eros — in his daring and prolific representation of lust, yes, but more broadly in his understanding of the erotic as an affirmation and preservation of life — through time and space. Beginning his latest collection with the piece “You Be the Dancer,” he bids us return to sacred sites of nostalgia, insisting on it “whether we’re feeling frisky, /  Empty-handed, / Or still beguiled by inchoate dreams—.” Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? is the apotheosis of Cassells’s work to elevate the mundane and the bodily to the exalted, his vigorous lyrics a routine ecstasy. Though our senses lay us bare to suffering, they also create the possibilities for pleasure and connection, the basis of — and rewards for — humanity. “My Only Bible,” Cassells pledges, “is this blood-red joy / Of breathing beside you,” “The gospel of bougainvillea / At your boyhood gate” which perfumes “the soul’s endless, luxuriant / Coming and becoming…” Gorgeous and wry in its portrayal of transformational romance and queer selfhood, Cassells’s ninth book of poetry reads as an anthology of love letters to people and places across the world. Cassells revises an old premise: is it better to have loved than lost, or is that love, once bestowed, is never lost? A champion of the flight real intimacy requires of us, Cassells addresses a beloved, “You’ve just died in my arms / But suddenly it seems we’re eternal,” the joie de vivre and bravery of his perseverance made immortal through the poem’s titular declaration — “I Believe Icarus Was not Failing as He Fell.” If in these pages you see the crash, the poet seems to say, remember the flying, too, “the giddy Argonauts we were.” 
 

Houlihan’s sixth collection of lyric poems reflects upon the persistence of what is lost and the accidental ruptures of trauma that allow re-entry into our world. These poems are at once despairing and hopeful.